Stone Age Economics “Sahlins’ forays into economic anthropology are full of interest.” Cyril S. Belshaw, American Anthropologist “Stone Age Economics, while not a survey of the economic anthropology, is as of now the most sophisticated, extensive presentation, and argument in and about, the field.” Walter C. Neale, Science “This book is subversive to so many of the fundamental assumptions of West- ern technological society that it is a wonder it was permitted to be published. ... Professor Sahlins directly challenges the idea that Western civilization has pro- vided greater ‘leisure’ or ‘affluence,’ or even greater reliability, than ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherers.” Whole Earth Review “His book is rich in factual evidence and in ideas, so rich that a brief review can- not do it justice; only another book could do that.” E. Evans-Pritchard, Times Literary Supplement Since its first publication over forty years ago Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics has estab- lished itself as a classic of modern anthropology and arguably one of the founding works of anthropological economics. Ambitiously tackling the nature of economic life and how to study it comparatively, Sahlins radically revises traditional views of the hunter-gatherer and so-called primitive societies, revealing them to be the original “affluent society.” Sahlins examines notions of production, distribution, and exchange in early com- munities and examines the link between economics and cultural and social fac- tors. A detailed study of tribal economies, domestic production for livelihood, and of the submission of domestic production to the material and political demands of society at large, Stone Age Economics regards the economy as a category of culture rather than behavior, in a class with politics and religion rather than rationality or prudence. Sahlins concludes, controversially, that the lives of those living in subsis- tence economies may actually have been better, healthier, and more fulfilled than the millions enjoying the affluence and luxury afforded by the economics of modern industrialization and agriculture. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by David Graeber, London School of Economics. Marshall Sahlins is Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Routledge Classics contains the very best of Routledge publishing over the past century or so, books that have, by popular consent, become established as classics in their field. Drawing on a fantastic heritage of innovative writing published by Routledge and its associated imprints, this series makes available in attractive, affordable form some of the most important works of modern times. For a complete list of titles visit www.routledge.com/classics Marshall Sahlins Stone Age Economics With a new foreword by David Graeber London and New York First published in Routledge Classics 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1972, 2003, 2017 Marshall Sahlins Foreword © 2017 David Graeber The right of Marshall Sahlins to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Aldine de Gruyter, a division of Walter de Gruyter, Inc. and Routledge 1974 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sahlins, Marshall, 1930- author. Title: Stone age economics / Marshall Sahlins ; with a new foreword by David Graeber. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge Classics, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017009801| ISBN 9781138702608 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138702615 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315184951 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Economic anthropology. Classification: LCC GN449 .S24 2017 | DDC 306.3--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009801 ISBN: 978-1-138-70260-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-70261-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-18495-1 (ebk) Typeset in Joanna by Apex CoVantage, LLC For Julia, Peter, and Elaine CONTENTS FOREWORD TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION ix PREFACE TO NEW EDITION xix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xxv INTRODUCTION xxvii 1 The Original Affluent Society 1 2 The Domestic Mode of Production: The Structure of Underproduction 38 3 The Domestic Mode of Production: Intensification of Production 91 4 The Spirit of the Gift 134 5 On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange 168 6 Exchange Value and the Diplomacy of Primitive Trade 259 ENDNOTES 294 BIBLIOGRAPHY 315 INDEX 335 FOREWORD TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION Back when I was an evolutionary anthropologist, I learned that the most successful species are those which remain the most generalized. If I hadn’t learned that I would probably still be an evolutionary anthropologist. —Marshall Sahlins I would like to use the occasion of this foreword to call for Marshall Sahlins to be nominated for a Nobel Prize in Economics. Surely if Bob Dylan merits a Nobel in literature, the author of Stone Age Economics, and of so many other works that have fundamentally changed our conceptions of the very nature and purposes of eco- nomic life, would be a worthy candidate for the prize in economics. The essays assembled in this volume have had a profound impact on any number of academic disciplines—the notion of the three circles of reciprocity developed in “On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange” alone has been adopted by archaeologists, historians, classicists, literary theorists, political theorists, psychologists, art historians, sociologists, philosophers, and students of religion. Perhaps the only discipline that has never made significant use of the theoretical tools provided in this collection is economics itself. But then, economists have a long history of rejecting any terms other than their own, convinced they are engaged in something akin to natural science with unique insight into human rationality (that is, they have come to believe that, perhaps x FOREWORD TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION alone among the social sciences, they really are scientists, and simul- taneously, that they study that domain of human life where people themselves behave most scientifically), they evince a notorious dis- interest in theoretical tools developed by anybody else. Economics is perhaps the most insular, the most self-enclosing of disciplines. Which is why it is the most in need of a jolt from the outside. Granted, history itself has recently dealt economics some jolts of its own. The crash of 2008 might, historically, come to be seen as some- thing of a turning point. Economics had acquired such unprecedented prestige in the 1980s and 1990s that it was being treated like a kind of master discipline, to the point where anyone considered fit to run any- thing significant, even a university or charity, was expected to have at least some training in it. But this prestige was largely based on having convinced the world that economics, as a discipline, had itself been responsible for creating a genuinely efficient, rational, self-sustaining global system. Then of course, it all blew up. The fact that virtually every major economist was taken entirely by surprise when it did so (about the only exceptions were a few oddballs, Marxists, Minskyians, and the like, scoffed at by the rest of the discipline), left many asking: What is it that economists are really good for? What is it they actually do? What purpose is really served by the existence of the discipline? Surprisingly, perhaps, the most aggressive questions were raised by students in economics departments around the world, who began organizing a global movement to change the way the discipline was taught: as a field of competing paradigms and theories like any other social scientific discipline, rather than as a uniform body of received Truth. * * * This is what makes the reissuing of this volume, and its recognition, so appropriate to the historical moment. I would like to see it con- sidered as part of the core curriculum for the reformed discipline of economics. Marshall Sahlins himself is a representative of one grand tradition in anthropology—perhaps the very grandest—that of the activist intellectual, engaged with social movements, but at the same time whose anthropological writings are if anything even more politically important, because they are aimed at having an impact on popular FOREWORD TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION xi understandings of social, domestic, political, and economic possibili- ties. We might call this the anthropology of liberation, because the role of such anthropologists has always been to liberate their readers from some mind-forged manacles that they didn’t even know were there. Each places a small chisel of reality to an otherwise impregnable- seeming wall of bogus economic common sense, one which causes us to believe, often in some very subtle way, that human beings have always been calculating bourgeois individuals, or else, have always wanted to be that, but just haven’t fully worked out the technical means. Marcel Mauss, active in the cooperativist movement (for many years he actually helped manage a cooperative bakery in Paris), was the first to effectively challenge the myth that economic life “emerged from barter”: that is, that people invented money because they were already engaged in market behavior, but hadn’t yet developed the appropriate technology.